by Phyllis Rose
A man who is dissatisfied with his marriage, if he has means and leisure and if he is a person of honour who wants to avoid a conflicting entanglement, has many possible ways of distracting himself from his problem, quite apart from engaging in amateur theatricals. He can work very hard. He can take short trips. He can indulge in quick dissipations. He can vary his usual social milieu and seek out low-life dives. All this Dickens did, usually in the company of Wilkie Collins, his favoured companion for adventure and self-indulgence, a man of considerable – and at this time to Dickens welcome – moral laxity (he kept a mistress). A man seeking to avoid confrontation with marital problems in a significant way can try to solve them or bypass them, by buying a new house. This, too, Dickens had done, in the spring of 1857, acquiring Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester, which he had coveted from the time he was a child and his father had pointed out the house to him, saying that if he were successful, someday he could live there. But the most direct way for a man to signal (if only to himself) that a marriage is no longer serving his needs, and the classic way to do something about it, is to fall in love with another woman.
His despair now increased because there was an alternative to it. He imagined a specific happiness from which he was being kept by his wife and family responsibilities. Dickens did not embark immediately on a sexual relationship with Ellen Ternan, but that, if anything, increased his sentimental attachment to her. He began to polarise his life so that all the excitement of it lay in the secret part. His family routine seemed increasingly a hollow masquerade, no more than an oppressive wrapping over his true, passionate self. His inner torment reached a new stage, compared to which his previous despair seemed mild, and he was later to say that he had not known a moment’s peace or contentment since the last night of The Frozen Deep. Having limited himself previously to vague hints about the source of his misery, Dickens began, soon after the close of the play, to speak (or rather to write, in carefully constructed letters) about his domestic discontent. From this time, the summer of 1857, we may date his years-long effort to shape his private life into a fiction, his most recalcitrant.
He chose as his confidant John Forster, one of his oldest and closest friends. Forster had always been his most trusted adviser on literary as well as on legal matters. (Forster had legal training, and although a writer himself, he acted as a kind of literary agent, in days before literary agents existed, for Dickens and other writers with whom he was friendly.) In the light of what he would write later, what Dickens wrote to Forster was a mild enough statement of the situation between himself and his wife:
Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too – and much more so. She is exactly what you know, in the way of being amiable and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man … I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her sake, that I ever fell in her way; and if I were sick or disabled tomorrow, I know how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise, the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when Mary was born; and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help me. Why I have even written I hardly know; but it is a miserable sort of comfort that you should be clearly aware how matters stand. The mere mention of the fact, without complaint or blame of any sort, is a relief to my present state of spirits – and I can get this only from you, because I can speak of it to no one else.38
It is a poignant document. Dickens’s pity of Catherine’s suffering seems genuine (‘I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her sake, that I ever fell in her way’), although the other side of it – his pity for himself – is so obvious as hardly to need statement. Despite their incompatibility, which time has exaggerated, as fame and success made him all the stronger and more expansive while she became more helpless and limited, the twenty years of their marriage has made some emotional bond between them. But he can only appreciate the force of the bond by imagining a disruption – sickness or disablement. And how interesting it is that he imagines himself getting ill and not Catherine, as though a solution to their problem might be found in some diminution of his strength, his health, his success, his fullness of being – or as though he should be punished for his wish to be rid of her.
Forster was not completely sympathetic. He replied that discontent is part of marriage; that it must be borne; that Dickens had a tendency to be too impatient; that he should look to his own flaws of character and try to mend them in hopes of bettering his relationship with Catherine. It was frustrating advice to receive when what he longed for was sympathy and an understanding of the unbearable claustrophobia he felt at home, but Dickens was so relieved to be talking about what was really on his mind that he took Forster’s response with equanimity. ‘I agree with you as to the very possible incidents, even not less bearable than mine, that might and must often occur to the married condition when it is entered into very young. I am always deeply sensible of the wonderful exercise I have of life and its highest sensations, and have said to myself for years and have honestly and truly felt, This is the drawback to such a career, and is not to be complained of … But the years have not made it easier to bear for either of us; and, for her sake as well as mine, the wish will force itself upon me that something might be done. I know too well it is impossible.’39
In this year, 1857, the Matrimonial Causes Act, which established secular divorce in England, was passing through its successive readings in Parliament. Dickens must have read reports of the debates in the newspapers and must have had tantalisingly before him the notion of being legally free of Catherine forever, free even to marry again. But it was impossible. Because even if the bill passed, as seemed increasingly likely, it was based on the fiction that one party in the marriage was guilty of its demise and the evidence of this guilt was adultery. If Catherine would commit adultery, he could be free of her. But that was preposterous. Immobile, conventional Catherine would never do anything so daring. And on the other hand, it was equally impossible that Dickens should present himself to the world as the aggressor, the guilty party, the adulterer. In this he was hardly unusual. Even after the Divorce Bill was passed, relatively few people in the period before World War I took advantage of it. And not until after World War I did the upper classes develop the sexual sophistication and contempt for the absurdities of the law necessary to produce the staged infidelities which became, for a while, a routine part of divorces by mutual consent.40 So, for Dickens, as for many others, divorce could offer no solution to connubial misery. The best he could hope for was some separation from his wife, relieving him from the irritation of her daily presence, but not allowing him the comfort of re-marriage. It seemed that the vital part of himself would have to be sacrificed to that grotesque fiction of domestic harmony which he himself, in his novels, had helped to impose upon England.
In 1857–58, as Dickens moved towards and then effected a separation from his wife, he displayed a ferocious impulse to make life repeat the patterns of The Frozen Deep. In the summer of 1857, on a walking trip in Cumberland which was intended to work off some of his misery and restlessness, he strode up hills at such a rate that Collins, his companion, could not keep up with him, eventually tripped and sprained his ankle and had to be carried by Dickens, as Dickens himself put it, ‘à la Richard Wardour’.41 Dickens seemed to do in whomever he was with and then look down upon his companions, however humorously, for their inability to kee
p up with him. With Collins as with Catherine, this was his way. Collins found it appalling: ‘A man who can do nothing by halves seems to me a fearful man.’42 And Forster, too, found all this charging up hills the expression of an impatience, impetuosity and absence of inwardness in Dickens.
Melodrama has its power, but as a way of understanding marital discord it is not particularly useful. Trapped by the melodramatic patterns in his mind, Dickens projected all his difficulties onto outward circumstance, of which the grossest embodiment was Catherine, and he cast himself, improbably, in the role of victim. Perhaps because of his childhood trauma of abandonment,43 for which he blamed his mother, Dickens continued to identify with the unprotected, fragile child and based some of his greatest work on the identification. But in his marriage, this fruitful fantasy made him fail to perceive his own power. He was male, with all the privileges of his sex; he was successful; he was rich, at any rate compared to his wife. Yet in his mind she appeared as the wounding and derelict parent. His own role was self-sacrifice. At the cost of his happiness, he had kept the family together. She had subsided and collapsed. If only (in the dualism of self-sacrifice and self-indulgence) he had thought of himself as frankly selfish and self-indulgent, he might have been kinder to Catherine in what followed.
The first gesture he devised to express outwardly the separation from Catherine that existed in his heart was interestingly equivocal. He asked the servant at Tavistock House to arrange for separate bedrooms for himself and his wife. His instructions were quite specific. Mrs Dickens was to have the bedroom which they had formerly shared. His dressing room was to be turned into a bedroom for himself. The connection between the two rooms was to be walled up and covered over with bookshelves. He was to have a new iron bedstead. Who was being walled up? Who was being kept from whom? The gesture is a bit virginal, as though Catherine were a rapacious sexual pursuer who had to be held off. Yet the bookcase he would see, should he think of returning to Catherine, and the iron bedstead he would have to lie in, seem rebukes to himself, reminders to deny himself the easy consolations of sex, which, over many years of unhappiness, he had had a hard time resisting.
For Catherine, however, the gesture was not equivocal. It was a harsh and devastating rejection. That Christmas of 1857, which was celebrated in the nation at large with particular joy because of the news from India that Lucknow had been relieved, was hardly celebrated at all at Tavistock House. No theatricals in the children’s theatre. Mrs Dickens was weeping, beginning to think she would be better off, subject to fewer indignities, if she were not living in the same house as her husband. Dickens could not throw her out of Tavistock House, but he arranged matters so that even that passive woman (prodded by her parents) came to think it better she should go.
In the spring of 1858, a bracelet which was intended for Ellen Ternan arrived at Tavistock House. It was a gift from Dickens which had been mistakenly delivered by the jeweller to Dickens’s own house. Dickens claimed that Ellen Ternan was not his mistress, that he often sent gifts of jewellery to young ladies who acted in his theatricals. Although one can hardly accuse him of having arranged this incident, which upset his wife terribly, one might expect him to have exercised particular care as to the address of a present to a young lady, whether or not she was technically his mistress. But Dickens contrived to turn the episode against Catherine, as proof of a conception of her character which had been growing in his own mind and which he began trying out on other people: she was insanely jealous. Years before, when they had been living in Italy, he had undertaken the treatment by mesmerism of the wife of a friend, Madame de la Rue. They were as close as analyst and analysand, whose relationship theirs in many ways resembled, and Catherine had been disturbed by their intimacy and the sheer amount of time they spent together. Dickens said at the time that her suspicions had poisoned their relationship with the de la Rues, and eventually he made her apologise to Madame de la Rue for them. It was to the de la Rues, therefore, that Dickens wrote, developing his notion of Catherine as insanely jealous: ‘I don’t get on much better in these later times with a certain poor lady you know of, than I did in the earlier [Villa] Peschiere days. Much worse. Much worse. Neither do the children, elder or younger. Neither can she get on with herself, or be anything but unhappy. (She has been excruciatingly jealous of, and has obtained positive proofs of my being on the most confidential terms with, at least Fifteen Thousand women of various conditions since we left Genoa. Please to respect me for this vast experience.)’44
When the jewellery incident occurred, Catherine accused her husband of having an affair with Ellen Ternan. He stood by his technical innocence and accused her of pathological jealousy. He reminded her of the de la Rue episode. She was displaying the same low mind now, repeating her vile suggestions. He had made her apologise to Madame de la Rue for her suspicions, as insulting to the lady involved as to him, and he would have her apologise to Miss Ternan now. Kate Dickens passed her mother’s bedroom and found her crying as she put on her bonnet. ‘Your father has asked me to go and see Ellen Ternan,’ sobbed Mrs Dickens, and her daughter claims to have stamped her foot and said, ‘You shall not go!’ But Mrs Dickens went. When she told her parents the story of Ellen Ternan’s bracelet and the apology, the Hogarths said she should insist on a separation. Dickens at first resisted this suggestion but gradually acceded to it. Since he had managed things so that the suggestion of a separation did not come from him, he needed to feel no guilt about it.
Now his energies could be wholeheartedly directed towards convincing other people of his innocence. It was particularly important to convince Angela Burdett-Coutts, for not only did he respect her personally, she was also, in her wealth and power, an embodiment of the Establishment. In his account for Miss Coutts of his domestic misery, notice how what begins as a neutral tale of incompatibility becomes a story of oppression. ‘I believe my marriage has been for years and years as miserable a one as ever was made. I believe that no two people were ever created with such an impossibility of interest, sympathy, confidence, sentiment, tender union of any kind between them, as there is between my wife and me.’ Nature had placed an insurmountable barrier between them. Catherine was the only human being he had ever known with whom he could not get along, in communicating with whom he could find no common interest. Indeed, no one could get along with her. (At this point, one begins to suspect caricature.) Her own mother would be unable to live with her. Her own children couldn’t stand her. ‘She has never attached herself to them, never played with them in their infancy, never attracted their confidence as they have grown older, never presented herself before them in the aspect of a mother. I have seen them fall off from her in a natural – not unnatural process of estrangement, and at this moment I believe that Mary and Katey … harden into stone when they go near her.’45
The truth of the matter seems to have been that Georgina, with more intelligence, inventiveness and energy than her sister, presented a more attractive alternative to the children and so took over their care and their affection. Dickens thought that without Georgina his household could never have functioned, but perhaps without Georgina, Catherine would have risen to the occasion and been a more outgoing mother. (Her children seem not so much hostile and alienated as simply distant.) But Dickens, caught up in his compelling fairy tale, cannot resist elaborating on the image of Catherine as a monster who turns even her children to stone. ‘It is her misery to live in some fatal atmosphere which slays every one to whom she should be dearest.’ His own role, by implication, is entirely passive; he is innocence in monsterland, Una or Sleeping Beauty or Little Red Riding Hood – or Oliver Twist, passing unscathed through the den of thieves.
Miss Coutts took laconic note that the Dickenses were separating because of incompatibility. She was satisfied that there was no ‘criminal’ connection at issue, and that was all she cared about. Her sympathies, however, tended to go to Mrs Dickens. Dickens had shown a child hurt, a child dying in books such as Dombey and S
on, David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop and the world had cried. He had shown children oppressed by fairy-tale monsters such as he imagined Catherine to be – unnatural, death-allied, slayers of life like Murdstone and Dombey. But he was not a helpless child. And his ‘oppressor’, Catherine, was strikingly not a powerful, authoritarian figure. Miss Coutts would not cry for him on this one. The formula was inappropriate.
Dickens moved into the offices of his magazine, Household Words, while the separation was worked out. Forster represented Dickens, and Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, whom Dickens had called the softest-hearted man in the world, represented Catherine. She was to have a settlement of £600 per year. She was to have her own house, and her eldest son, Charley, would live with her. But all the other children were to stay with Dickens. They could visit their mother if they chose to, but Dickens did not encourage them to – in fact, quite the opposite. Kate and Mamie took music lessons across the street from Mrs Dickens’s house at 70 Gloucester Crescent and never stopped to visit their mother. She was not invited to Kate’s wedding. In later life, Kate felt guilty. ‘We were all very wicked not to take her part; Harry does not take this view, but he was only a boy at the time and does not realise the grief it was to our mother, after having all her children, to go away and leave us. My mother never rebuked me. I never saw her in a temper.’46 Dickens did not make his children choose between himself and their mother. He simply assumed that, as the law allowed, they would stay with him. And so they did. They were happy to. He was dynamic, funny, famous, charismatic and powerful. Nevertheless, their staying with their father rather than their mother strikes us as so unusual that we wonder whether the mother may not have been the monster the father said she was. So we should remember that children were at this time the property of their fathers. Under law, a man’s wife was his property, too. Married women had no legal status, no legal existence. They were entitled to nothing. When Caroline Norton, the writer, separated from her dissolute husband, she had to fight to be allowed even visits with her children. All the money Mrs Norton earned from writing went to her scapegrace husband, whether she was living with him or not. In cases of divorce or separation, therefore, children more commonly went with the father than they do now. Then too, the Dickens children adored their father. Next to him their mother may have seemed irritatingly commonplace. Particularly for Mamie and Kate, the normal tendency of girls to overestimate their fathers and resent their mothers must have been exaggerated by the agreement of the outside world. They thought their mother was not worthy of their father. They blamed her for not keeping his love.